Julián de Zulueta, ¿el rey de los negreros? Reflexión etnográfica en torno a la memoria de la esclavitud en el País Vasco

Toutain, Maxime

Publication year:

2023

Publication place:

Donostia

Characteristics:

BIBLID [1136-6834, eISSN 2386-5539 (2023), 47; 101-144]

ISSN:

1136-6834, eISSN 2386-5539

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Summary

During the 2010s in the Basque Country, several cultural productions were created about Julián de Zulueta y Amondo, a slave-owning landowner, slave trader and politician from Álava. This article is an analysis of the intentions and narratives of these cultural productions in order to question the possibilities of a memory of slavery in the Basque Country, based on data collected through the ethnographic method. In attempting to assess the history of the Basques in Cuba or the heritage of Vitoria bequeathed by the Zulueta family, these cultural productions, constitute a historical memory whose narrative structures adopt, thanks to a Basque-Cuban historiography, a “historical relativism”, that is, a rhetoric that allows the dissociation of slave violence from the monumental traces left by its capital. However, this historical memory of Zulueta, by provoking criticism and other types of memorial discourse, offers the conditions for the emergence of a Basque public memory of slavery.

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